Daily Poll Watch: This analyst says Obama more likely to win in Electoral College than in popular vote

From time to time, I link here to stuff from Sam Wang, a polling analyst at the Princeton Election Consortium. But this doesn’t mean that I fully understand Wang’s rather arcane methods of analysis. His references to meta-this and sigma-that are — in more ways than one — Greek to me.

Despite all that, I point you this morning to THIS POSTfrom Wang, in which he says:

[H]ere is something interesting. National polls do not match the state polls – and it is state races that determine the outcome, via the Electoral College. In the Meta-Analysis that Andrew Ferguson and I report on this website, Obama has been ahead all along…

The general pattern is clear: viewed through polls that focus directly on electoral mechanisms, Obama performs 1-2 points better than in national polls.

The likeliest cause of this discrepancy is that in states where it matters most such as Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado, the two candidates are genuinely overperforming/underperforming…

I will be interested to see if on Election Day, the national vote and the electoral vote count still show this discrepancy. If both are accurate, President Obama’s re-elect probability is about 90% – but his probability of winning the popular vote is lower, about 70%.